* * * * *
                                        
                 This kind of puts your boss into perspective …
                                        
> … a few weeks later a guy broke into Frick's office and shot him in the
> neck. Twice. At this point Frick rose up (presumably laughing deeply while
> his wounds suddenly healed before the assassin's eyes) and fought back. The
> cops came and arrested the assassin, and Frick was back to work in a week.
> And by "back to work" we mean he quickly fired 2,500 workers, and halved
> the pay for the ones who were left.
> 

“The 6 Most Horrific Bosses of All Time | Cracked.com [1]”

And Henry Frick [2] was only the fourth most horrific boss of all time. I
mean, I thought my boss at Negiyo [3] (it's been over ten years now) was
psychotic—he got pissed at me because I came down with acute bronchitis [4]
and took a few days (okay, two weeks!) off. He dismissed the doctor's note I
procurred, changed my schedule without informing me, and had scheduled my
exit interview with HR (Human Resources), while telling me, in no uncertain
terms, that he had full blown pneumonia [5] for six weeeks and that never
stopped him from coming into work every single XXXXXXXX day. I found out
later that a few months before I started with Negiyo, he had a somewhat
invasive heart procedure and was back to work the next day!

He also had a habit of logging into the computers systems at night and
checking up on us third-shift workers (I'm not going to say he had no life,
because who am I to cast that aspersion on someone, but he certainly took his
job way too seriously, especially since the department itself was nothing
more than an expanded version of Tom Smykowski's job [6] (no, really! If tech
support thought a server was down, they would call our department. We would
ping the machine, and if it didn't respond, we could then call the Unix or
Windows administrators and tell them a machine was down. Seriously! That was
the job! Some well written scripts could have done our job. Such was life at
Negiyo).

After reading that article, I realized that it wasn't as bad as it could have
been. At least he didn't lock us in a burning down office.

(Just a warning—if you are anything like me, then viewing any page at
Cracked.com [7] will suck you into that abyss for easily a few hours. Just
thought I should warn you.)

[1] http://www.cracked.com/article/89_the-6-most-horrific-bosses-all-
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay_Frick
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/11/01.1
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002078/
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001200/
[6] http://www.llakomy.com/Projects/flashvideo/office-space/tom-smykowski-s
[7] http://www.cracked.com/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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